Andy Greenberg chronicles the ordeals of Tigran Gambaryan, a former IRS agent and Binance compliance officer, who was detained in Nigeria. Lured to Nigeria under the guise of resolving issues between Binance and the Nigerian government, he becomes a pawn in a multibillion-dollar extortion scheme.
Still, for months to come, the US government wouldn’t intervene in Gambaryan’s criminal prosecution. The result, for Frentzen, was an appalling situation: After a career in the federal service, the former IRS agent responsible for many of the biggest cryptocurrency criminal busts and seizures in history was left with only hands-off government support in the midst of what appeared to be, itself, a crypto shakedown.